International MOX and Nuclear Contracting Problem Comes to Portland

by Paige Knight, President, Hanford Watch

Two members of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment arrived in Portland as part of a national tour to raise awareness of the dangers of the plutonium economy and the damaging effects of processing irradiated nuclear materials. Hanford Watch hosted the speakers in an evening presentation at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland. British Nuclear Fuels, Ltd. (BNFL), the corporation responsible for the "recycling" of nuclear materials for nearly 50 years, has resulted in the Irish Sea becoming the most radioactively contaminated sea in the world. In the Cumbrian countryside surround the Sellafield Reprocessing Plant, plutonium is found in people's house dust, in children's teeth and in people's bodies. Radioactivity is actually flying over the Sellafield fences via pigeons that have become contaminated at high levels through roosting on the site. BNFL has had to remove up to ten inches of topsoil from nearby gardens to prevent the spread of the contamination carried by the pigeons. Citizens have also been warned to not use the nearby beaches for recreation or for gathering or fishing for seafood.

This issue is of great interest to those of us living in this region affected by the Hanford Nuclear Reservation because of the recent $6.9 billion contract awarded to BNFL by the USDOE to glassify the 54 million gallons of radioactive wastes in the 177 underground tanks at the Hanford Site. Martin Forewood and Janine Allis-Smith, whose trip includes stops in Texas, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Kentucky, Georgia, South Carolina, Washington DC, and New York, are long-time neighbors of the Sellafield plutonium processing facility in the UK, which is operated by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL). Sellafield contains two large reprocessing facilities (for the separation of plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel), a pilot facility for fabrication of mixed-oxide (MOX), plutonium-containing fuel, and a full-scale MOX fabrication facility which has not yet begun operating.

The goals of the CORE members' visit to the US are to provide a first-hand account on BNFL's environmental and economic track record in the UK, to describe the impact of Sellafield's operations on their community in northern England, and to talk about the environmental and health impacts of plutonium processing more generally. Their perspective is particularly important for US audiences at a time when DOE is launching a MOX program to handle surplus plutonium from dismantled weapons, and powerful voices on Capitol Hill are calling for renewed reprocessing as a "solution" to nuclear waste problems.

BNFL has cut corners in safety practices, has knowingly polluted the Irish Sea, has been way behind schedule on their contract for reprocessing irradiated fuel, has not found solutions for the waste that their processing creates and in the realm of vitrification has not been successful in meeting the promises in that contract either. BNFL is not used to open public participation or with being forthright even with the government that subsidizes their work. The public interest groups that work on Hanford issues will be digging through the DOE/BNFL contract over the next several months through their involvement on the Hanford Advisory Board, a regional citizens' "oversight" group to insure that this is not another deep-pockets cleanup project with no results. Cleanup of Hanford is a top priority for the health, safety and economy of our region.

Paige Knight, President
Hanford Watch
2285 SE Cypress St.
Portland, OR 97214
(503) 232-0848
paigeknt@juno.com
www.hanfordwatch.org

Watchdogs of Great Britain's "Nuclear Dustbin" to Visit Amarillo

"This is the third accident this year alone that has involved the evacuation of workers, and the second accident to involve plutonium dust. It is just another sign that BNFL does not have the operations fully under control," said Martin Forwood from Cumbrians Opposed to Radioactive Environment (CORE) in a recent interview. Forwood was discussing the August 3, 1998 accident where plutonium oxide powder leaked in a laboratory and forced the evacuation of 72 workers at British Nuclear Fuels, Ltd's (BNFL) Demonstration MOX Facility at its Sellafield Plant near Cumbria, United Kingdom.

The MOX demonstration facility contains "state-of-the-art" technology that serves as the "prototype" for BNFL's large scale Sellafield MOX Plant--a facility that has yet to operate. Forwood and fellow CORE campaigner Janine Allis-Smith consider BNFL's MOX plant to be the latest in a long series of unjustifiable nuclear developments that Forwood states have left "one hell of a mess, quite honestly."

Sellafield: One Hell of a Mess. The infamous Sellafield plant has reprocessed plutonium for Britain's nuclear weapons program since the early 1950's, and later expanded to commercial reprocessing. Originally called "Windscale" and later nicknamed the "Nuclear Dustbin," in 1957 it was the scene of the most severe nuclear reactor accident next to the Chernobyl disaster.

Today, as a result of past and present radioactive discharges to the air and sea, people are warned against eating the highly radioactive pigeons found around Cumbria, and lobsters with abnormal levels of radioactive elements are found as far away as the Norwegian coast.

"There is plutonium in the river sediments, in people's gardens, and in the mountains nearby. While they were checking out Chernobyl's fallout they found that fifty percent of the contamination in the mountains where sheep graze came from Sellafield. The government stopped the consumption of sheep found with certain levels of radioactive elements," said Allis-Smith.

The primary villain has been plutonium reprocessing, which involved "chopping up the fuel and dissolving it in nitric acid and separating the plutonium and uranium through a whole series of chemical steps," said Forwood. The results included three "enormous" radioactive waste streams that have degraded air, water, soils, and human lives.

Plutonium Wastes The most dangerous high level waste is stored in liquid form and "stays in the tanks for five years, and after it cools it passes into the vitrification plant where it is mixed in a glass matrix and poured into a 'churn' that will be stored at Sellafield for at least fifty years," said Forwood.

"Intermediate level wastes," continued Forwood, "is a mixture of solids and liquid sludges and slurries that goes into an encapsulation plant and mixed with concrete and put in drums and stored on site. The industry tried to build a deep repository at Sellafield to dispose of this waste but the Government denied permission to build the repository so BNFL is now forced to store this waste indefinitely at Sellafield." The failed repository was called NIREX, and stopping its construction was a major victory for anti-nuclear dumping groups such as CORE.

"The third waste category, the low-level waste, occurs as a liquid, a gas, and a solid. The gas of course just goes straight up the chimney after some treatment, the liquid gets pumped into the Irish Sea at the rate of about two million gallons each day, and the solid waste is taken by rail to BNFL's licensed low level waste dump."

The liquid low-level waste has resulted in "radiation levels in the environment that are very high, and even if reprocessing stops tomorrow the historic discharges from the plant means the radioactivity will remain at high levels for a very long time because of the half-lives of the materials. This is contrary to what the industry said in the 1950's, when the claim was made that the materials would be diluted in the seas. Of course, we now find that there is over a half ton of plutonium in the Irish Sea Bed and it gets washed on shore."

"We are now faced in a position that there are levels of radiation in the local environment that are higher than the levels permitted in BNFL working buildings and they would be illegal in BNFL's' customer countries."

The Human Cost of Plutonium Processing

Gaseous discharges, radioactive liquid wastes dumped directly into the sea, and the buildup of radionuclides in the environment has had its costs.

Janine Allis-Smith got involved in CORE "in 1984 with CORE when my 12 year old contracted childhood leukemia. We had just heard reports of the high incidences of childhood leukemia jut south of the Sellafield Plant and I wanted some answers because we has spent a lot of time on the beaches during extended vacations in the 1970's when my son was just a baby and the discharges were 100 times more radioactive than they are now. We sort of camped on the beaches and I put my on in these radioactive discharge rivers, which they did not tell people about. I became convinced this was a probable source of my son's illness."

According to Smith, childhood leukemia at Sellafield "is the most investigated illness in the whole history of the British medical field. They all come down to the same thing, there is no doubt there is a statistically significant increase of childhood leukemia in the area. BNFL claims it has nothing to do with radiation, and the battle has been long. BNFL with their unlimited resources funded many other epidemiological studies and although we lost our case in court, we believe that Sellafield is very unique, that it has discharged more into the immediate environment than any other plant near such a sizeable population. They have no idea how much was showered onto the population in those early days, uranium particles and plutonium, it was found in people's gardens and on children's shoes. We believe there is an underestimate of the dose people were exposed to."

According to Allis-Smith, BNFL scientists produced an alternative, and controversial theory, to substantiate its claim of no impacts from its nuclear operations.

"BNFL's scientists came up with a theory that people from the outside came into the area with a virus that the local population could not resist. The theory does not work in our view because the area had in the early 1940's a munitions factory which brought many people in from outside. But the leukemias did not start until Sellafield was opened."

CORE's GOAL CORE's goal is to bring to an end the uneconomic and unnecessary reprocessing operations at Sellafield, which would mean an immediate and significant reduction of radioactive discharges, no further accumulations of unwanted plutonium and nuclear wastes, a halt to nuclear transports, and the promise of a safer, cleaner future for Cumbria and its communities.

BNFL in America "BNFL is a public company, but it has one main shareholder," said Martin Forwood, "and that is the British Government. Any money BNFL cares to spend on new operations, new buildings, and its very slick public relations program comes from the public purse."

This slick PR program is a major force in the United States now. BNFL has spent years establishing itself as a major contractor in the Department of Energy's cleanup program. According to economist William Weida, BNFL's subsidized loans from the government of Great Britain has allowed it to build a monopoly on DOE's "privatization" portion of cleanup. Most recently, BNFL landed a $6.9 billion contract at Hanford to solidify the high level liquid radioactive waste being stored in leaking tanks. BNFL's other recent coup was to team up with Morrisson-Knudsen to purchase Westinghouse Corporation's Nuclear Division.

BNFL has been lobbying the U.S. to pursue the MOX option for plutonium disposition and build a plutonium infrastructure that would clearly help salvage its failing plutonium industry abroad.

Don Moniak
Program Director
STAND of Amarillo
(Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping)
7105 W. 34th Ave. Suite E
Amarillo, TX 79109
806-358-2622
806-355-3837 (FAX)
dm4stand@igc.apc.org